5AM Saint | BrewDog

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Start the car. The lights are about to turn amber. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Past the alley where thieves and pimps sell corporate brews and good men soak it up like vermin, blissful in their ignorance. Past the jackhammers who want their three and a half percent. Keep going. Towards that golden orb, the size of Zeus’s ass, that hovers over this crazy town. Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink amber, and drive like a bastard towards that saintly light.

Reviews by interistacanadese:

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330ml bottle, thanks to my friend Chris for including this in his Tactical Nuclear Penguin tasting this evening. The typical BrewDog label hubris continues to amuse me.

This beer pours a clear, dark red-brick amber hue, with two fingers of lazily puffy, though densely foamy, and somewhat soapy beige head, which leaves a decent swath of layered aging cheese lace around the glass as it slowly ebbs away.

It smells of a muddled grapefruit, blood orange, and pineapple fruitiness, caramel malt, a bit of treacly toffee, a mild sugary nuttiness, and further floral, wet leafy hops. The taste is more understated grapefruit and obscured tropical fruit sassiness, a sturdy bready caramel malt, a touch of overripe lemon, and fading earthy, leafy hops.

The carbonation is quite low-key, and almost lazy - if I must say more about it - the body on the low side of medium weight, adequately smooth, and perhaps a touch creamy. It finishes off-dry, the mixed malt sweetness contending with a diminishing hop bitterness.

A front-loaded PACNW-friendly dose of hops, but one which unfortunately peters out towards the end. Overall, another confusing, if still quite tasty ale from this wannabe sexy brewery. The funny thing is, I'll be up until around 5 a.m. tomorrow morning (by design!) for a software implementation at work - would that I could enjoy a few of these during that time, for their 'iconoclastic' support, at the very least.

A: Pours a beautiful amber color forming a medium bubbled beige head. Good retention and some lingering thin lacings left in the glass

S: Sweet caramel malts mixed with a delicious grassy, flowery and a bit pinny American style hops. A bit fruity and some notes of caramel

T: Slight sweet upfront. Caramel malts, toffee followed by a mild hoppy bitterness. Again, very flowery, grassy and pinny. Yeasts are also American style, I would dare to say that they've used US-05 American Yeasts

M: Light body and good carbonation. Aftertaste is a mix of caramel malts and grassy hops

O: Great drinkability. Lovely American Pale Ale style made in Scotland! Hooray for Brewdog

My second experience with what has certainly come to be a favorite brewery of mine. This is a red ale turned up to 11. It manages to be quite hoppy while at the same time keeping a strong malt flavor as well. It pairs excellently with the assortment of meats and cheeses available as part of the tasty pseudo-ploughman's lunch platter available at their Edinburgh location as well as with their punk IPA (I had both on tap that day for the first time and definitely not the last as rumor has it that they are opening several locations on this side of the pond next year). Altogether an excellent beer which I will be regularly buying in bottled form until such time as I can find it on tap again either in Scotland or the States.

I like a hopped up amber as much as a good IPA and Brewdog did well for themselves here.Poured into a standard pint glass a clear rich amber/bronze with a fluffy one finger slight off white head that clung to the glass leaving broken blotches of lace behind as it settles slowly.A mix of caramel,and chocolate malt aromas mixed with a hefty dose of citric hop,very left coast old school amber ale to me.Flavors have the standard caramel malt flavors upfront but a nice shot of citri hop and some earthiness in the finish.I have had mixed feelings about the Brewdog stuff I have had,but this is a very good amber,I love the hop flavored burps!

Appearance - This came out a good-looking brown with orangish hues and a very nice, full fluffy head that left good lacing.

Smell - The malts are heavily-toasted and a bit stale. There's some light raw sugar in there and maybe some orange rind but really the nose is rather clumsy. The hops are leafy but very stiff and I'm also getting some kind of biscuit. This one is hard to classify but there's definitely something a bit off here.

Taste - The beer loses most of its structure at the taste. I still get the toastiness but it is shallow and lacks any real bready punch. The sugars come off as stale and artificial and the only thing left from the hop aroma is a kind of annoying leafy taste.

Mouthfeel - When I think of this style I expect a big mouthfeel and this one just didn't pull it off. It is thin, I wouldn't even call it medium-bodied, with little fizzy carbonation and an annoying bitter finish. I enjoy a big bitter bite so am not averse to the characteristic but here it just fell flat in the cheeks.

Drinkability - I liked smelling this enough before each sip to finish the bottle but this is a clumsy, confusing beer that I won't buy again.

The beer pours a reddish-brown color with a khaki head. The aroma is toffee and bready malt with some orange hops. There is also some chocolate malt and pine hop notes in the aroma. The flavor is heavy on the toffee and caramel malts with pine added in. The chocolate malts are faint but are present in the flavor as well. Very little hop bitterness but a good amount of hop flavor. Thin-medium mouthfeel and medium-high carbonation.

I don't usually begin with a critique of a beer's label, but I must make an exception for 5 a.m. Saint. A label, of course, has little to do with the actual contents of the bottle, besides being a method of attracting your attention with flashy colors, funny names, and, occasionally, cartoons. Some labels do go so far as to describe the beer in terms familiar to a connoisseur, and others offer a pithy-but-funny story. The Arrogant Bastard series goes so far as to openly state that the drinker is "not worthy" of the bottle's contents, which is slightly off-putting, but does at least go along with the name.

But then we have 5 a.m. Saint, the label of which begins with the line "You probably don't know much about beer," and continues from there into a diatribe against the blandness of most beers, and accuses the drinker of having unwittingly participated in the exaltation of the same, precisely because the drinker doesn't know enough about anything to, well, realize how dumb and inexperienced they are: "You can't help but be sucked down the rabbit hole." Yes, the blame is ultimately laid on beer manufacturers for producing and hyping such blandness, but still, I do have to question the marketing skills that led to the creation of this label: who exactly is this material supposed to attract, and who is the intended audience? Beer connoisseurs already know why they've picked up this bottle, and novices will probably be turned away by the language. Which is all to say, don't judge this one by its cover; let the beer do the talking.

Because if you do, I don't think you'll be sorry. 5 a.m. Saint, for all of its questionable marketing, begins with an immensely fruity, sugary nose, ripe with apricot, nectarine, rose hips and rosewater, brown sugar, and grapefruit, and is truly mouthwatering.

On the tongue, the immediate blush of sugary fruits (carrying all of the above notes onto the tastebuds) is quickly joined by a heavy grapefruit-rind-and-pine hop base, as well as a good handful of toasted almond and pecans. The IBUs only clock in at 25, according to Brewdog's website, but if feels like much more than that, as the hops quickly take over the mouthful and remain in charge even through the aftertaste (the result of massive dry and late-hopping). The result is a brew that is full of wonderful hop notes--resins, citrus, lemon, rosewater--but light on bitterness, making for excellent fare. Mouthfeel is a dry medium, and carbonation is medium-heavy.

Overall, this is great fare, and might be a good place for people just getting interested into more hoppier brews to start, as it gives an excellent look at potential, without twisting the tongue into bitter knots. Just don't read the label until *after* you've had a sip, and you might make it through...

Immediate aromas of pine, with underlying malt and notes of candied apricot. The aroma profile was more reminiscent of an IPA than I was expecting.

A balance of sweet malty caramel and citrusy tangerine notes, with a late nuttiness that developed more as the glass began to drain.

The mouthfeel was a bit narrow and seemingly over-influenced by the hops. The beer seemed to bite on the center of the tongue, and didn't develop fully throughout the mouth. Finished refreshing, with lingering bitters.

Overall a refreshing and pleasant experience from those Brewdog mad scientists.